And Happy Birthday to Sally!!

Even at 18 months, Sally liked to dress up, and she didn't take much of anything too seriously. She is still like this now, too.



Here she is this past summer, looking poised and radiant.

Happy birthday, dear Sally. Thanks for all the fun when we get together. You light up our lives......

Happy Birthday to George!!

Well, it's Sally's and George's joint birthday (though just a few hours left to qualify for Sally and probly too late for George. It's 9:07 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time here in the U.S., which means it's around 2 a.m. tomorrow in Waterbeck. Anyway, I am sitting here surrounded by pressed foam and little bits of blue tape trying to get my new scanner/printer/copier to work. Who knew that having children meant you would be staying up waaay past your bedtime until you are older than dirt? They don't tell us these things when we are young. They just expect us to figure it out.

Anyway, here is a neat photo of George in his kilt at Aunt Katie's wedding. George is the only....wot....niece or nephew except for Annie to have attended both of Katie's weddings. At #1 he was but 14 months old and a great charmer while Annie was just a few months old. At #2, he had just turned eleven. As any mother can tell you, an eleven year old is practically the most adorable age. You can talk to eleven-year-olds as if they were adults, but they're still kids. And after that, it might be nice if they could be sent to the kibbutz until they are, like 26 and fully educated--with jobs, even.) (Well, not you, George.....you can stay around a bit longer.) You're 13 now! A true teenager, and a mighty accomplished one, too. George is a certified Scuba diver, and he can order his breakfast in four languages: English (or whatever it is they talk over there in Scotland), French, Arabic, and Greek. Beat that!

Here is a photo (unscanned) of George digging in his sporran for....and I asked him this..."What do people keep in sporrans, George?" And he said, "Fish hooks." All of us in earshot laughed like loons. He is a very sweet, very funny kid, and he'll go far.

Happy birthday, sweetheart. Your auld gran loves you!!!

Social Life

Saturday, 9/9/06....I should be getting ready to go out to celebrate the birthday of a friend (let's call her Tina), and I shall...in a minute. Tina's a foreign-born deaf woman who graduated from Gallaudet with a good degree a number of years ago. Like many deaf college grads, she is underemployed/unemployed at the moment. She's bright, literate, friendly, cultured, oral (meaning she can speak and read lips), warm...you'd think any employer would love to have her. She did get a good job working for the federal government right after she graduated, but her mentor, the man who hired her and encouraged her, was transferred, and she was laid off after maybe 10 years on the job. That was several years ago. She's been looking for work or working at menial jobs since.

Thanksgiving before last, I stayed in DC to volunteer at Rosemary's Thyme restaurant on Thanksgiving Day. The restaurant owner every year opens her kitchen so that Burgundy Crescent (a DC volunteer group) can serve Thanksgiving dinner to the homeless. I won't tell you how many Gallaudet grads were there to receive rather than distribute dinner, but Tina declined to go out of embarrassment. Her family is upper middle class where they live, and while she has wonderful resilience in living the life of a "handicapped" person, at times it gets to even her. So I invited her to meet me for dinner after the event at Sette Osteria, my favorite watering hole on Connecticut Ave and R Street NW.

Sette puts on a marvelous spread every Thanksgiving...that year, it was $25 a head for a prix fixe (how do you say that in Italian?) dinner of turkey medallions, stuffing, gravy, sweet potatoes, green salad, a fancy dessert of maybe pumpkin mousse (Italian, please!!) with whipped cream, a nice big glass of wine, and coffee. We enjoyed ourselves immensely. Then Tina went back to a shelter for homeless women, and I went back to my place to sneeze my head off. At the same time as we distributed the dinners, we also passed out slightly worn clothing that folks had donated. That was the most fun of all--helping people pick outfits. Sure, there were the usual employed folks who showed up to grab the best free stuff first, but wot the hey....we dint judge...we just coordinated shirts with sweaters and jackets and pants and saved the good stuff for the smiliest homeless, who never failed to give us heartfelt thanks. The clothing arrived in black plastic trash bags, mostly, and about one in ten bags clearly had been used by the donor's cats for sleeping bags--for quite some time, too! The cat hair swirled in the air over the tables and clung to my jacket and pants...probably my socks, too. I am wildly allergic to cat dander, and the distribution ended mercifully just before I launched into full-bore wheezing.

9/11/06.....Tina has just come back from a two and a half week visit with her parents, who are in their late 80s. You'd never know it to look at them or talk with them. They are sharp as tacks, healthy, happy. Tina's spirits got a great boost from seeing them for the first time in maybe four or five years.

Earlier in the day, Tina ran into one of her first roommates at Gallaudet and invited her to join the birthday celebration. We can call the roommate Trudy [again, not her real name]. Trudy is a diminutive woman with an incandescent smile and smooth skin that belies her age. She is one of the Lancaster County Amish--that is, Pennsylvania Dutch. Former Amish, actually, since Trudy left the Amish community back in the late 1980s after she finished high school. She has been deaf since birth, like two or three of her siblings. She did not leave because she felt lonely or isolated in her deafness. There are plenty of deaf Amish who remain in the community and are quite happy and secure. She left because she did not feel comfortable with their beliefs. She has since reconciled with her parents (she calls it "being forgiven"), but there was much bitterness when she left the family and community. Especially since one of her brothers followed suit several years later. (Even now, when she returns "home," she does not sit at the family table. There is a special table for those who have left.) We asked her how long it was before she saw her parents again after she left, and she laughed, "Two weeks." They found out where she was and came after her to bring her back, but she refused. She applied for and got a job as a live-in domestic, then applied to the state of Pennsylvania's Vocational Rehabilitation Agency, which helped her eventually to get a college degree. She now has a master's degree in education of the multiply handicapped and works for the government.

Tina, Trudy, and I are all "oral" deaf, meaning we communicate largely through speaking, even though we all sign (they much better than I). We laughed on Saturday night when we noted there were no culturally deaf persons there to pick on our signing. Trudy wears one hearing aid and has a cochlear implant in the other ear. Tina wears no hearing aids (I don't think!), and I wear two. Our other dinner companion, my friend Mary from Iowa, is a hearing woman who signs and works as a social worker for the deaf-blind. It was through Mary that I connected with Burgundy Crescent. Mary is perhaps the all-time champion of volunteers. She works every weekend for some good cause.

This is my life in DC. I am blessed to know extraordinary people who have come through fire to live what most people would consider an independent, self-supporting, ordinary life. I did most of my volunteering when I was younger, but I realize I could get off my duff and do more now, even when my cells are crying out to siddown and watch the teevee.

Overnight to NYC

I snuck up to NYC yesterday morning on the cheapo bus ($35/rt to NYC from DC). This was the first time the view from the bus/train of the south end of Manhattan near Wall Street minus the World Trade Center towers has NOT left me feeling profoundly sad. In the beginning, I couldn't look at all.

I went with my friend Mary from Iowa. She and I both lived in Iowa City back in the 80s, but we didn't know each other. It was only when she started work as a grad assistant at Publications and Information that we met. And now we hang out once in a while. We stayed at the Sheraton Manhattan on 51st and 7th Ave, and walked down to the Village after we checked in.




Times Square was jammed, although these photos don't show it. Everybody, their baby, and their dog was visiting NYC yesterday. Mary said she heard many languages being spoken.





We stopped at a bar around 35th Street and 7th Ave, and discovered an Irish barman and an Irish pal of his celebrating happy hour. We ordered a couple of drinks. Mary (left) asked for a "half and half," pictured here.


It's a lovely creation to look at, although I don't personally go for that dark beer. I had a cosmo with a shot of Grey Goose on the side (to add to the cosmo, which most happy hour emporia seem to think consists of lots of ice, a dribble of vodka, a squirt of some kind of hawaiian punch from a hose, and a slice of lime.

We walked and walked...almost all the way from the hotel to the end of Hudson Street down in the Village and back to Madison Square Park to the Shake Shack for supper (deelishus burgers!). We took a cab back to the hotel after that, since it was getting dark.

The NYC cab drivers don't get much for their labors these days--at least not half as much as the ones in DC do. NYC drivers have meters, and the DC drivers have a weird zone system that clearly was set up by Congress. E.g., you can drive anywhere in Georgetown for one zone's worth of fare, but for me to take a cab from my front door to Dupont Circle (a 10 minute walk, and a 3 minute drive) is two zones. I am a liberal tipper, which means by Midwestern standards, I "overtip." According to some standards, that leaves me open to ridicule by the cab drivers! This notion says that the cab drivers will not respect me if I overtip. Ooooh!

All I know is that the first cab driver in NYC yesterday asked us if we would please get out of the cab since we were only 5 or 6 blocks form the hotel, and he was not making any money in the jammed-up traffic. I asked him how he was going to drive anywhere else--across the sidewalk and over the park??--but then I said to Mary, "Let's get out...I'm tired of this guy's whining." So we got out and hopped on the subway, which took us within two blocks of the hotel. I was happy that Mary had said she was paying for the cab ride, since she religiously pays a 15% tip...wrings the nickels out to make it come out precisely. Served that guy right to get his measly 15%.

I tip at least 20-30%, often more--up to 100%, since I love taxis and taxi drivers, and they work like dogs for hardly anything, and now that I do not own a car myself, they are like angels from heaven. They take you where you wanna go, and then they go the hell away. You don't have to put gas in the car or park it or pay the insurance. What's not to like?

New Mom's Club

Helen, my very cool grandniece, belongs to a New Mom's Club. The moms and the relevant kids get together at regular intervals. The moms eat cheese and stuff, and the babies try to steal each other's binkies. Here's some footage from as far back as last March, when the New Mom's Club and the babies were only about 3 months old.


Whoa, baby! Love the hair!!


Good God, Georgia! Can't they SEE?